CDP implementation

In the current, volatile business landscape, CDPs have become essential drivers for growth. Not just because of their ability to provide a 360-degree customer view, boost cross-selling and upselling, but also for their efficiency gains and data security compliance. In this way, they allow businesses to meet customer expectations, and differentiate themselves from the competition.

Asking the real questions

Still, adding a CDP to your marketing stack is a major business decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Some critical questions to ask yourself in advance are:

• Do you have the specific business goals and objectives you hope to achieve with your CDP straight? Are you looking to improve customer retention, increase sales, enhance personalisation, or something else entirely?

• What’s the state of your current data landscape? Which data sources and storage methods do you currently have? What’s the quality of your current customer data?

• Which data do you need to realise the above objectives? Where is relevant customer data generated in the customer journey, and how will you collect it?

• Does the new CDP facilitate compliance with data and privacy regulations like GDPR? Does it offer the tools to ask for consent?

• Will the new CDP work well with your existing systems and technologies, e.g., marketing automation, CRM, analytics tools, etc.?

• Do you have enough budget for CDP implementation and maintenance? Which CDP vendors or solutions align with both your needs and your budget?

• Do you have the necessary resources and expertise to implement and manage a CDP effectively?

Of course, there are many more things to consider. What it comes down to, however, is that a successful implementation depends on a comprehensive, long-term data strategy that takes into account quality, compliance, and governance.

Four major hurdles

In addition to the above, these are the four most common practical hurdles businesses face in their CDP journey.

1.   A complex and lengthy tool selection process

Because CDPs are a booming market, lots of software vendors want to join in. The result is a wide range of tools, each with their own unique proposition. Finding the right fit can be hard, especially considering the critical role the CDP will play in your business. The key, however, is to truly understand your needs and business requirements.

All too often, businesses are imprecise in their definition of data management and customer engagement needs. This leads to either selecting an overcomplicated tool, or one that lacks essential functionalities.

2.   A technically complex implementation process

CDP implementation projects are, without exception, technically complex projects. How complex exactly depends, of course, on the complexity of your organisation. But any business of a certain size will have a variety of data sources with their own formats and structures that will have to be integrated, resulting in a complex implementation process.

3.   Budget restrictions

CDPs come with a cost. Take licensing fees (EUR 100,000 per year, easily) and ongoing costs (another EUR 100,000, why not), and you’ve got a considerable CAPEX investment on your hands. Without proof of value, those budgets can be challenging to defend internally.

4.   Missing skills and resources

With that price tag, you’d expect your new CDP to deliver value in and of itself. Wrong. To really leverage its power, you need some savvy experts with specific skills. These include data source experts, customer experts, channel experts, marketing technologists, data analysts, operators, legal experts, and so on.

Subscribe to the future of CDP

All of the above can lead to businesses continuously postponing their CDP implementation, or even cancelling it entirely. As a result, the data they’re already collecting today sits idly and doesn’t generate any value. Moreover, customers keep getting the same sub par customer experiences, or miss out on much-needed added value. In other words, the cost of doing nothing keeps adding up.

However, there is another way. One that bypasses the hefty upfront investment, disruptive implementation processes, and many other hurdles: CDP as a Service. This subscription-based, full-service offering from MultiMinds is developed for any organisation that is either still on the fence with CDP implementation, or is looking to get started with their first use case as fast as possible.